view entire issue in pdf format - On The Issues Magazine

ate of abortion complications goes up when there
are anti-abortion demonstrations outside a facility.
Obviously, to "Operation Rescuers", women
play the role of being merely inconvenient civilians
who just happen to be incubating the real victims
(fetuses) in the Holy War that they have conceptualized
and evolved.
However, it is important to note that during the
reign of Reagan, "double-think" became the accepted
form of social and political reality. Nuclear
missiles were "peacekeepers", ketchup was "a
vegetable" and all Americans were " better off
than they were" some time in the past. This
"Kafkaesque" tactic of obscuring truth with
pseudo-truth was actively appropriated by much of
the local and national press which gave "Operation
Rescue" and its participants a great deal of
coverage and, sometimes, positive reviews. James
Buchanan, a dedicated Reagan propagandist, went
so far as to describe Joan Andrews, an imprisoned
terrorist "rescuer", as a "Prisoner of conscience"
(N.Y. Post, July 2, 1988). Reagan
himself has shown his disregard of the laws of this
country by meeting personally with Joseph
Scheidler, the strategic architect of "Operation
Rescue'', and publicly praising the activities of the
"right-to-life" movement.
The New York City Police, many of whom
seemed to be naturally inclined to "Operation
Rescue's" philosophy, were also caught up in the
fantasy. Pursuing a policy of "selective enforcement",
police treated the blockaders with kid
gloves, including the use of stretchers to take protesters
away gently (as opposed to dragging them
as they have civil rights and women's rights activists),
issuing desk tickets and releasing "Operation
Rescue" "prisoners of war" soon afterwards,
allowing them to return to the blockade site once
again.
This treatment was in marked contrast to that
given pro-choice activists who were pushed, pummelled
and herded into small areas behind barricades,
and especially to the rough handling of two
pro-choice men who were arrested. Unlike "O. R."
participants, the pro-choice activists were booked,
put through the system and held in jail overnight.
It took an intense and pressured meeting with Police
Commissioner Benjamin Ward to publicly shame
the police into upholding the law and insuring
women's access to constitutionally-protected
medical treatment.
The conduct of the New York City Police was
typical of what has happened across the country
where the police have not enforced the law—have
not protected women's constitutional rights but, instead,
have allied with and supported the antiabortionists
as part of "just doing their job".
Given the reality of the central strategic importance
of reproductive freedom in women's lives and
in an overall feminist agenda, and considering the
reality of the increasingly dangerous and violent activities
of the anti-choice movement (along with the
increasing numbers of their apologists in the press
and supporters among the police) it becomes obvious
that feminists must wage their battles in the
unreal, illusory world of the electronic and print
media as well as the real world of the courts and
streets.
These battles must also be fought within
ourselves as we struggle to differentiate objective
reality from a media-created world.
Sociologist Gaye Tuchman has used the term
"symbolic annihilation" to describe the general
treatment of women in the media. Expressions of
this treatment include women being projected into
images that are evil, manipulative, stupid and
stereotypic. The most insidious type of annihila-
"These 'Ghandi disciples'
are the people
who publicly brag that
the rate of abortion
complications goes up
when there are antiabortion
demonstrations
outside a facility."
tion takes the form of "absencing", the
phenomenon of attempting to totally obliterate the
female presence in the mass media.
This "absencing" phenomenon was very much
in place during "Operation Rescue", where the
organized, concentrated and effective activities of
the pro-choicers were either totally ignored or given
short shrift in all the main-stream (including
"Liberal") press. In New York, Newsday was the
only paper that attempted, and often succeeded in,
giving the pro-choice participants fair and accurate
coverage.
"Operation Rescue" had succeeded in abstracting
and masculinizing the struggle—noble, pious
men trying to save unborn babies' lives while prochoice
forces became the generic "female"—
dangerous, assertive, selfish, shrill—forces that had
to be eliminated (annihilated) if only, at this point,
by paper tigers in the press.
'' Representation of the world'' writes Simone de
Beauvoir, "like the world itself, is the work of
men; they describe it from their own point of view
which they confuse with absolute truth."
This can be translated into the old saying that "if
it's not in the New York Times it doesn't exist" or
the Times' own slogan in which they say they print
"all the news that's fit to print".
De Beauvoir's is a central truth; however she
neglects to extrapolate to the extraordinary effects
of cultural conditioning that give rise to women
who describe themselves as feminists, yet buy into
the male point of view and see the world through
male glasses. This phenomenon is its own type of
"symbolic annihilation". A case in point:
The New York Times published an article in their
Sunday Magazine entitled "When Feminism
Failed" by Mary Anne Dolan (June 26, 1988). The
"fait a compli" of the title alone alerted me to
potential negative propaganda. I was not
disappointed.
The author, a past editor of the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner, writes about her pain and disappointment
with feminism that sprang from her experience
of working with a group of women whom
she had hired and groomed as managers. Dolan
writes that she expected the "promise" of the
Women's Movement to be fulfilled at work. That
"promise" included "thejoint belonging to us, being
a family", generating "respect between male
and female" which would, in turn, create an environment
where "we would have honest conflict
and competition, but also compromise and consensus
and therefore success".
Mary Anne Dolan, in fact, found only one
woman that she appointed was able to achieve the
"heights" that Betty Friedan wrote about in The
Second Stage where she described the point where
women learned to "compete, not as a woman or
a man, but as a human being". Apparently,
feminism is now being defined as a state where
women are the ultimate competitors. Dolan then
goes on to describe how women in power positions
took on the very worst attributes of the men in
power.
Reading this piece, I became acutely aware of
a particular brand of intellectual analysis that
reflects a masculinized sensibility parading as
feminism. I was also aware that the author was not
alone in her convictions. Indeed, I have been privy
and part of many conversations, at both political
meetings and cocktail parties, which focused on
how really terrible these women in power had
become—how difficult it was to work with them,
how women couldn't work together, how there was
a rising and increasingly obvious problem with
women's inhumanity to women etc., etc.
Personally, I am acutely aware of problems facing
women in power—on a practical, political and
personal level—problems with politics, with theory
and practice, with personal growth and with
managing the tension that comes from wanting to
succeed in the marketplace while being politically
correct and psychologically healthy at the same
time. The tension that comes from balancing one's
inner reality with the socially controlled and defined
one set out for us...
However, it is a grave error to judge the success
or failure of the feminist movement by the standards
of the workplace or the personalities of
specific individuals within it. In order even to begin
to analyze whether or not a particular movement
or social vision has succeeded or failed it has to exist
as a living phenomenon in the real world, not
merely as an intellectual or political abstraction. We
cannot assume that anything approximating a
feminist social or political reality exists. In a very
real sense, feminists today—in this time and
place—are exiles, exiles from a vision of what we
dream a feminist society should be.
And there is a vision out there, a transcendent
purpose and dream that makes up the stuff of what
feminism really is. The edges may be a little
cloudy, as all visions are, and individual feminists